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This article traces Google queries in South Africa over the 2004–2016 period for American presidential frontrunners, eventual winners and incumbents. Within-country differences are also noted in this regard; the data will be broken into geographical concentrations, with the magnitude of each American candidate’s Google searches ranked by South African provinces. Simultaneous worldwide Google searches will be used as a control group for each search trend per candidate to note whether interest in each candidate was on par, below, or above the global average. Importantly, this is a generative study and as such no proposal of cause-and-effect relations is made in this article. Rather, findings will generate working hypotheses and areas for further study.